Welcome to Labor Day Weekend at the tail end of August: it’s Sunday, August 31, 2025, and National South Carolina Day, whose Official State Fruit is the peach, whose Official State Snack is boiled peanuts, and whose Official State Vegetable is collard greens. Boiled peanuts are excellent, by the way; here’s a stand I patronized in February, 2013 on a lecture tour in Georgia and South Carolina. Try ’em! (The recipe is here and you can use raw peanuts instead of freshly-harvested “green peanuts”.)
It’s also It’s also National Diatomaceous Earth Day, Eat Uutside Day, National Trail Mix Day, and National Matchmaker Day.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the August 31 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Trump has run into two roadblocks in the last day. The first is that a federal appeals court ruled that many of Trump’s new, high tariffs were illegal.
A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that many of President Trump’s most punishing tariffs were illegal, delivering a major setback to Mr. Trump’s agenda that may severely undercut his primary source of leverage in an expanding global trade war.
The ruling, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, affirmed a lower court’s initial finding in May that Mr. Trump did not possess unlimited authority to impose taxes on nearly all imports to the United States. But the appellate judges delayed the enforcement of their order until mid-October, allowing the tariffs to remain in place so that the administration can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
The adverse ruling still cast doubt on the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s trade strategy, which relies on a 1970s law to impose sweeping duties on dozens of the country’s trading partners. Mr. Trump has harnessed that law — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA — to raise revenue and to pressure other countries into brokering favorable deals. The law has typically been reserved for sanctions and embargoes against other nations.
The loss proved especially stinging after the Trump administration told the court earlier on Friday that any weakening of its tariff powers could unleash economic chaos. Hours before the ruling, the president’s top economic advisers raised special concern about the fate of the trade agreements the United States had struck with other governments. Among the deals they cited was an agreement with the European Union, which made favorable concessions to escape even higher U.S. taxes on its goods.
In a social media post after the ruling on Friday, Mr. Trump blasted the court and its conclusions, and appeared to tee up a forthcoming appeal to the Supreme Court.
“Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end,” Mr. Trump wrote. “If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country.”
My response is, “No it wouldn’t. Tariffs are bad for the country.” I am curious about what the Supreme Court will do. Until they rule, the tariffs remain.
*And the second roadblock: a federal judge in Washington D.C. halted, for now, Trump’s attempt to deport ever more people.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting a wider group of people without a court hearing, a blow to one of the key parts of President Trump’s deportation campaign.
In January, the Trump administration expanded use of fast-track deportations to immigrants who can’t prove they have lived in the U.S. illegally for more than two years. Previously, the rule only applied to people in the country illegally for fewer than two weeks and were found within 100 miles of the border.
U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb said in a Friday night order that the administration’s rule is illegal and those immigrants should be able to appeal their case.
She said the government’s argument that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally aren’t entitled to due process was startling.
“Were that right, not only noncitizens, but everyone would be at risk,” she wrote. “The Government could accuse you of entering unlawfully, relegate you to a bare-bones proceeding where it would ‘prove’ your unlawful entry, and then immediately remove you.”
“The group of people the Government is now subjecting to expedited removal have long since entered our country,” Cobb wrote in her order. “That means that they have a weighty liberty interest in remaining here and therefore must be afforded due process under the Fifth Amendment.”
In my view, unless someone is apprehended in the act of entering the country illegally, they are entitled to due process to see if they should be deported, regardless of how long they can prove they’ve been here. I can’t remember the Supreme Court ruling on this one, but its recent rulings have made it harder for those in the process of being deported to appeal their case. Once again, we shall see.
*Finally, Trump—or rather his factotum Kari Lake, continues to dismantle the Voice of America, getting rid of 500 more employees.
The agency sent out notices late Friday night ahead of the Labor Day long weekend, with a termination date of Sept. 30, multiple recipients told The Washington Post.
Note the words above: “Tasked with dismantling the Voice of America.” And that’s what Trump wants to do. More:
VOA was founded by the federal government in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, according to the outlet’s webpage, practicing a form of soft diplomacy by broadcasting stories about democracy in countries where press freedom is limited or nonexistent. Previously, the government-funded broadcaster and its affiliates reached 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week.
During his first term, President Donald Trump accused VOA of speaking “for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.” In March, the president issued an executive order aimed at chiseling the agency down to its “minimum presence and function required by law,” a move that led to more than 1,000 journalists being placed on indefinite administrative leave.
Lake, a Republican politician who ran unsuccessful races for Arizona governor in 2022 and U.S. Senate in 2024, went on to fire 500 contractors in May and attempt to fire more than 600 full-time staffers in June, a move that was rescinded soon after the federal employee union AFGE found the agency made numerous administrative errors.
VOA journalists have been challenging the moves in court since the March executive order, filing a lawsuit accusing officials of unlawfully shuttering the media outlet. In April, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a preliminary injunction halting part of the executive order, but a federal appeals court overturned parts of Lamberth’s injunction, including a provision that ordered staffers back to work.
Lake — the acting CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media — has faced legal challenges amid allegations that she is overstepping her statutory authority, and was blocked earlier this week from firing the director of Voice of America.
Trump apparently thinks the VOA is the Voice of our Enemies, and, truth be told, I don’t know about its political slant. But I doubt it’s anything like NPR, and when I listened to it in Europe it seemed pretty balanced. Remember, for many countries it’s the only source of news not controlled by the government, and even that makes one doubt about unfunding it. One might say it is, at least partly, the voice of freedom, and the more objective it is—reporting criticism of the government—the more credibility it has.
*The NYT reports how Israel managed to target so many of Iran’s nuclear scientists and military leaders; it’s called “follow the bodyguards.” (The article is archived here.)
The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.
It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran’s war with Israel, and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists.
Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.
The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.
Israel’s tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.
According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years — including posting on social media — played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli Air Force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.
“We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones; they did not take precautions seriously, and this is how most of them were traced,” said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.
The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.
Granted, this isn’t as clever as Beepergate, but it’s damn clever anyway, and relies on spies and other Israeli operatives in Iran.
*The AP Science section reports old conclusions as if they were new ones: scientists now claim there are four species of giraffe in Africa instead of the classic one: Giraffa camelopardalis (that had nine subspecies). Earlier I questioned reports from 2016 (yes, nine years ago) that there were actually four species of giraffe based on genetic data. Now they’ve added more data to come up with the same conclusion of four giraffe species, but the problem remains: decisions about biological species status based on subtle morphological or genetic distances are purely subjective.
Giraffes are a majestic sight in Africa with their long necks and distinctive spots. Now it turns out there are four different giraffe species on the continent, according to a new scientific analysis released Thursday.
Researchers previously considered all giraffes across Africa to belong to a single species. New data and genetic studies have led a task force of the International Union for Conservation of Nature to split the tallest mammal on land into four groups — Northern giraffes, reticulated giraffes, Masai giraffes and Southern giraffes.
Key studies have emerged in the past decade highlighting significant differences between the four species, said the IUCN’s Michael Brown, a researcher in Windhoek, Namibia, who led the assessment.
Naming different giraffes matters because “each species has different population sizes, threats and conservation needs,” he said. “When you lump giraffes all together, it muddies the narrative.”
How so? There were already subspecies named on both morphological and genetic grounds, and so the differences were recognized. The issue with the Biological Species Concept (BSC) is that species are conceptualized as those entities that maintain barriers of reproduction where they coexist in nature. And that’s the rub here, as none of these “species” live in the same place. Whether they would merge or remain distinct were they to move into each other’s ranges is anybody’s guess (I would guess they’d merge, but we can’t say for sure. But what we cannot say for sure is that there are four distinctive giraffe species. Here’s a map of the new “xpecies” from the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. As you can see, no two species overlap geographically. Without that, we’re just guessing about what kind of gene exchange, if any, would occur were they to come together under natural conditions:
Considering four giraffe species “is absolutely the right decision, and it’s long overdue,” said Stuart Pimm, a Duke University ecologist who wasn’t involved in the analysis.
While in the past researchers scrutinized giraffes’ spots, the new categories made use of newer methods including extensive analysis of genetic data and studies highlighting key anatomical differences, such as skull shape.
What appear like horns sticking up from the foreheads of giraffes are actually permanent bony protrusions from the skull, different from deer antlers that are shed annually.
Over the past 20 years, scientists have also gathered genetic samples from more than 2,000 giraffes across Africa to study the differences, said Stephanie Fennessy at the nonprofit Giraffe Conservation Foundation, who helped in the research.
I don’t know how Pimm is so sure about a subjective species concept (there is no subjectivity about whether humans and chimps are different species; they do not exchanges genes in areas where they cohabit). For the present, I’ll consider that there’s only one species of giraffe with differentiated populations.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej is having a rough time of it:
Hili: They say you can get used to anything.
Andrzej: That’s not true.
In Polish:
Hili: Podobno do wszystkiego można się przyzwyczaić.
Ja: To nie jest prawda.
*******************
From Things With Faces:
From CinEmma:
From Now That’s Wild:
Masih seems to have nearly given up tweeting. Well, her substitute is always handy:
I’ll never understand why a movement intent on removing protected spaces for women and children attracts so many men who appear to wish or enact harm on women and children. https://t.co/4twsjuP1AS
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 29, 2025
From Luana. Who said that gay kids aren’t heavily pressured by their peers to say that they’re trans?
This is how mental illness is being shoved on children. This young woman has a very powerful message. Thank god for her stepmother! pic.twitter.com/BwdQlTUDfs
— Rose Prasad 🤟💙💙🧡🧡🇮🇱 (@Roseprasad6383) August 28, 2025
Fr0m Malcolm; I could use such a transfer of power!
Transferring power pic.twitter.com/KddhAvCvRK
— cats with powerful aura (@PowerfulAuraX) August 22, 2025
Two from my feed:
what other techs already reached their peak form? pic.twitter.com/fEOAUhlDMS
— kira 👾 (@kirawontmiss) August 29, 2025
The bird wants to play, too:
I’m in too..🐦🐾😅 pic.twitter.com/AeIGK60sVt
— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) August 29, 2025
One I reposted from the Auschwitz Memorial:
This Dutch Jewish boy died in the camp at 19, only a month after he arrived.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-08-31T10:16:41.078Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. The first shows that ChatGPT can be wrong:
Today in AI Is Not A Good Source For Learning About The World's Most Misunderstood Body Part, meet this ChatGPT gem. Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.
— Vagina Museum (@vaginamuseum.bsky.social) 2025-08-27T09:58:22.357Z
Nasty whelks!!
The most chilling science video ever shotwww.youtube.com/watch?time_c…
— Trevor A. Branch (@trevorabranch.bsky.social) 2025-08-25T16:33:39.284Z
No Hili. Some things you do not ever get fully used to. The pain changes from 90% of the time to maybe 10% or even less over the years, but even 25 (and more) years later, a spurious memory will bring a tear or a smile from time to time. Such is the nature of good, strong memories.
“The archeology of grief is never ordered.”
from “H is for Hawk”
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted; when to breathe the air is sickening, you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money. -Alanis Obomsawin, filmmaker (b. 31 Aug 1932)
I’m not a doctor, but even I know the rectum is orange and has swollen ankles.
+1
Yes, some ai results are vaguely amusing, but in life-critical situations, ai recommendations, or even worse, ai-based hard decisions or actions such as with an autopilot on an airplane or car, can be fatal. I hate ai!
So do I, Jim.
What a very sensible tomboy! Should be obiglatory watching for young teens.
I’ve always been a tomboy, and I hate seeing fellow tomboys being pushed into believing they are trans. In my youth I fought against female stereotyping. I didn’t expect to have to do it all over again in my retirement.
A while back I made some t shirts on the topic. The link ISN’T self promotion to buy a t shirt, I suggest you DON’T buy from Zazzle as they have become very expensive, instead, you can take the text and have it printed on a t shirt by Amazon for a much lower price.
I particularly like the “transwomen are men” slogans written in binary and Egyptian hieroglyphics. They are very subtle 😁 I’m thinking of getting one of the latter printed by Amazon for my trip to Egypt in October 😈
https://www.zazzle.co.uk/t_shirt_girls_tomboys-235162053023747294
Genderists are quick to make two points:
1.) “Of COURSE there are tomboys we never said there weren’t we are ALL ABOUT gender nonconformity!”
2.) “Just asking a child if they MIGHT be trans is in no way a form of coercion because, per point #1, we’re totally cool with gender nonconformity so it’s fine with us if they’re not trans.”
Genderists here have a definite blind spot on how social coercion works. Perhaps the parades celebrating the Gender Diverse have gotten in their way.
100% on coercion. I think that is the source of many children who think they are trans. Any decent parent knows that a young child doesn’t always tell the truth, they often just say what they think their parent wants them to say. There are many videos showing parents influencing their children. Instead of asking, what her toddler wants to wear, a mother asks “are you a boy today or a girl”. Many people call this Transhausen by proxy. A parent wants a ‘trans’ child for the attention and the child goes along with it to please the parent, without realizing it’s going to end up in mutilation.
Exulansic has done a good video on this. She calls it the Clever Hansel effect. It includes the mother asking her child again and again and again whether they are a boy or a girl. The kid just wants to play.
https://rumble.com/vsae6d-clever-hansel-effect-gender-role-model.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp_a
I was shocked by the video as I didn’t realise that teachers are doing that too. Perhaps they get kudos for having a ‘trans’ child in their class.
Thx for that Joolz. I adore Exulansic but sometimes miss her posts to rumble.
Says something that her work is not acceptable to youtube etc despite it being nowhere near obscene or objectionable to (most?) people.
Like Mia Hughes, Ex is an excellent fighter in this battle.
I’ll probably be unable to make the genspect conference in Albuquerque this month which is a shame b/c I’d love to meet them in person. (and get them to sign my boob! -hahaha).
D.A.
I think in most cases it’s not that a parent “wants a trans child for the attention,” but that they’re afraid. They want to be extra sensitive to their child’s needs because if their child is trans (and according to the media so many are!) but they ignore this, their baby could be scarred for life. And it will be the mother’s fault.
It seems to me to be another version of what’s called Safetyism, which is characterized by “extreme risk aversion, a need for control, and an obsession with eliminating threats, both real and imagined.”
hahha. Excellent.
Zazzle used to be pretty good. I’ll remember that.
It isn’t just tomboys that are pushed into the trans poison meatgrinder, lots of neurodivergent, gay and just anxious kids are. It has been amazing to watch this over the last decade, seeing it become larger, more powerful, more deranged. Ruined many young lives and blown apart many families. Much of this was “achieved” by its central mechanism, widely promoted: the suicide (myth) blackmail.
D.A.
NYC
Totally. I have seen religious families trying to trans a child because they would rather have a mutilated child, that they can pretend is heterosexual, than a gay child.
This is why I believe a full psychological assessment is essential before any person is allowed trans surgery.
Trauma from child abuse, clinical depression etc are things that can make a child reject their body. It is essential to explore the reason someone wants to trans, because underlying mental health issues are unlikely to be fixed by cutting off body parts.
Ironically the trans community are shooting themselves in the foot by fighting against these assessments. They insist it is ‘conversion therapy’, so we end up with people being pushed to transition for reasons that are nothing to do with gender. This is why there are so many detransitioners and the suicide rate AFTER transition is higher than the rate BEFORE transition.
What you describe in your first sentence is the approach taken by Iran. If someone is identified by the authorities as gay, they face a choice: either be executed, or have “sex change” surgery to make them appear female. I guess the assumption is that Allah made a mistake by putting a female soul in a male body, and it is up to the theocrats to correct Allah’s mistake. Which raises the obvious question of why the perfect Allah would have made a mistake in the first place.
Yes, I only learned about it when I read the article below.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29832690
It’s interesting how so many religious people can twist their interpretation of their ‘god’ to match their own personal bigotry.
Imagine leaving the engine of your car running so your pet can have the A/C on. Apparently gas is still way too cheap.
How about taking your dog with you when you leave the car or leave the dog at home if you can’t take it with you. Nah… let’s burn fossil fuels instead. Even worse: the car window was down. Even more worse: being proud enough of this stupidity to take a photo and post it.
I suspect it’s fake. Unless the dog is a danger to humans, someone could easily reach into that gap, open the door and drive off with the car.
Although, if it’s true, I presume it’s an electric car which is why they have to tell people that the engine is on. I’d also assume that the photograph was taken by a passer by.
But whether it’s petrol or electric, having the engine on means the key is in the car, and what driver would make stealing their car so easy?
I can assure you that the thought of emitting more CO2 from leaving the engine running is the furthest thing from the mind of the driver with the dog. If gasoline is still “too cheap”, it’s because voters vote against political parties that want to make it more expensive by taxing it more, or even “allowing” it to get more expensive from scarcity. They won’t change their minds from people scolding them. They won’t even drive the speed limit, which in aggregate would save more CO2 than a few cars not idling for a few minutes. Even in Canada, where people have elected the Liberal Party to Government in four straight elections because they profess to believe in doing something about climate change, the Liberals had to finally face reality and “axe the [consumer-level carbon] tax” in order to win that fourth mandate. (We’ll see if they tempt fate by bringing it back now that they are safely in power and the main opposition party is floundering around trying to figure out what to do since the Liberals stole its major platform plank.)
(P.S. I agree with Joolz that it’s probably a staged photo.)
AI image generators can be an absolute trip. My all time fave are AI labelled diagrams of a cells, as the results are mixtures of beauty and horror. Have a look at this example: https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/comments/1at6uer/which_bing_ai_generated_cell_are_you_feeling_like/
Maybe AI is a member of trantifa because it drew a pregnant man…
If Trump is making massive cuts to federal spending and raising so much money via tariffs, where is the tariff money going?
I’m amazed at the number of US citizens who think that undocumented aliens have no right to due process and that the Constitution protects only their rights.
He actually made a huge EXPENDITURE in his income tax cuts. This budget item is bigger than all other items his Big Ugly Bill put together.
But the tax cuts were essential to attract wealthy donors.
But the federal government is heavily in debt. That’s what the tariffs for: to offset the tax cuts.
Of course a tariff is a tax! But unlike income taxes (that fall more heavily on the wealthy) the tariffs affect everyone. So the wealthy are still better off.
He did cut federal expenditures but they’re a pittance compared to the tax cuts (the NYT had an article with all the figures).
Do you know if that’s true, that tariffs disproportionately favour the wealthy more than income taxes do? Surely the wealthy buy far more imported expensive luxury goods than poor people do, and all people can avoid the tariffs entirely by avoiding imported goods. If an imported good is too expensive (because of tariffs) for a poor person to buy, he does without, and pays no tariff at all. If a can of beer costs a tenth of a cent more from the tariff on the aluminum used to roll the can, or a Smartphone costs $100 more, that price increase is either a deal breaker or it isn’t. A wealthy person may decide he needs (or wants) the imported Mercedes-Benz (because he can afford it) and so pays the tariff without hesitating.
It’s true that poor people spend a larger portion — often more than all of it — of their income than high-income people do, so any consumption tax does hit the poor harder, relatively speaking. But each wealthy person spends far more absolutely than any poor person does, and so pays much more tax, whether it’s a sales tax, a VAT, or a tariff, or, for that matter, a municipal property tax. And unlike an income tax, a person can avoid a consumption tax by adjusting his consumption habits. A tariff regime is counting on buyers to be willing to pay tariffs, else the tariff would raise no money at all. The tariffs then have to be aimed at rich people, not the poor.
This narrow tax question has nothing to do with whether tariffs are good economic or geopolitical policy, nor whether the President of the United States has the Constitutional authority to impose them, two very interesting questions for wonks. (FWIW, the executive cabinet (= the PM) in Canada has the authority, which it has been using, to impose or rescind tariffs at will without requiring legislative authority from Parliament for each tariff so imposed.)
All I know is that the wealthy donors for whom he cut the taxes don’t seem to care about the tariffs.
As for the wisdom of the tax cuts, note that the federal government is awash in debt, in the trillions. Not a good time to add a whole pile more.
The tariffs do provide revenue. But two courts have ruled against them so who knows what happens next?
Being in the country illegally is illegal. The only due process needed to prevent deportation is for the individual in question to show documents proving they are in the country legally rather than illegally. If they cannot provide such evidence they are subject to deportation. This is so simple that when I was a youngster living in California many decades ago, everyone understood it, and roundups and deportations of illegals were common and not controversial. The Democrats in particular were all for mass deportations of illegals in those days to protect the wages of low skilled working citizens. My how times have changed.
The Voice of America web site, which I used to read regularly, has been moribund—absolutely unchanged—since March 15. Go have a look: https://www.voanews.com/. The world came to an end on that date.
It actually would be interesting to see how little the design of items like safety pins, bobby pins, BIC Cristal pens, etc have changed over the years. But that would take a little while to put together and it is so much easier to simply copy the same pictures. [i have never been able to figure out how to embed pictures in comments here.]
The design of bobby pins may not have changed but the quality has definitely deteriorated. Don’t know if you’ve ever put one in your hair or a child’s hair, but there’s a coating on the ends that protects your scalp and enables the pin to smoothly slip over the hair before in “closes”. That coating now notoriously comes unglued and pinches your hair as you try to remove the pin. On some brands the coated ending just comes right off… the first time you use it! These are the little things that cause people to snap. Not wars or tariffs or school shootings. Nope. It’s cheap bobby pins. How many fractions of a cent do these companies earn by creating such garbage? And that’s what much of the crap we buy today is, garbage!
1K lobsters! Sigh. I think they could’ve made the same point with ten. I guess that whelks don’t live deep where lobsters normally do.
Also, those whelks are using cone-snail toxins (conotoxins) to immobilize their prey. The field of conotoxins is a fascinating one, pioneered by Baldomero “Toto” Olivera @ U Utah, and that has led to medically useful discoveries and understandings of neurological pathways.
The science comment about giraffes is important; nowadays it seems like people use the word “genetics” as a sort of final answer to the question of whether two forms are the same species. As Jerry points out, genetic differentiation per se is not enough to answer that question.
For my Andean orchids, I have developed a rule of thumb that may also work in some other regions. Andean climate history is now fairly well understood, with large datable rises and falls in temperature, leading to plants moving up and down mountains over time. During cold periods, plant populations will be highly connected, but during hot periods plants will move up mountains and be isolated on their peaks. This last major cold period was the last glaciation about 12000-20000 years ago.
With some exceptions (genetic incompatibility, physically impossible mating morphologies, etc), populations have to be in contact to use the Biological Species Concept. But even though populations may not be in contact now, nature may have done the BSC experiment for us in the past, during the cold glacial period, when species moved down their mountains and met the populations from neighboring mountains.
So if we have a time-calibrated phylogeny and we find that the divergence time between adjacent populations is significantly greater than, say, 20k years, this could indicate that the populations did not interbreed when they were together (depending of course on the precise history of the habitat over time). If the divergence times are less than that, this is evidence that they did interbreed when they lived together.
There is still plenty of wiggle room, but this idea brings a bit more objectivity to the question of whether populations are distinct species. In the case of giraffes, I bet the climate history of Africa is known well enough that this strategy could be applied.
That’s interesting.
I would imagine that “Eat Uutside Day” is big in Scotland.
😁 We have sitooteries especially for that. Yes, it’s a real word.
Unless this was edited leaving out logical connectors, either there is a mess of confused reasoning here, or the judge is just playing her role in The Resistance (TM).
Starting with the end, a person who entered the country illegally surely doesn’t gain any rights against deportation merely from having evaded the authorities for many weeks or years, by living in sanctuary states and cities, for example. This is what “open borders” just means: “We can’t officially advertise that we don’t enforce the law, but in fact we won’t deport you if you hide long enough.” Surely a person who has been underground for a long time would dearly love a “liberty interest” against deportation but is that really what the law says?
Second, it seems hard to imagine a situation where the government’s erroneous contention that I entered or remained in the U.S. unlawfully would need to be disproved. All of you born in the U.S. can produce a birth certificate or at least recite your birthdate which can be checked against state birth registries. Even children of aliens get birth certificates. For those like me born somewhere else, there is a record of our having entered the U.S. and with what permissions and for how long. (Canadian citizens don’t need visas to enter the United States as non-working visitors for less than six months. But our entry is recorded off our passports.) If I overstayed, or was working (illegally) and was caught in an ICE raid on the startup I was coding for, ICE would know I wasn’t a U.S. citizen. My only ID would be my Canadian passport. What reason could I possibly give a judge to keep ICE from deporting me forthwith? That I was really a U.S. citizen or an alien on a valid work visa but couldn’t prove it? On the other hand, if I was legal, wouldn’t it behoove me, especially if I looked “foreign”, to keep my work visa or citizenship proof on me all the time, knowing as we all do that the United States is now run by fascists and racists? (/sarc, except that there are Canadians who say they believe this.) And if there was no record of my ever having entered the U.S. (because I snuck in), why again shouldn’t ICE deport me forthwith? What miscarriage of justice does a judge prevent in overseeing these proceedings? This is all administrative stuff, not a determination of guilt.
The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution says, in small part,
(This is the only mention of “due process” in the Constitution.)
I’m sure there are many thousands of pages of jurisprudence about what “due process” means but to us lay foreigners, it means all the protections against arbitrary state power to punish such as habeas corpus, search warrants, the grand jury process, right to a trial by jury, no self-incrimination (and the other 5A protections), rules of evidence, right to cross-examine, presumption of innocence, right of appeal, etc. etc.
But note: The Fifth says that “due process” applies to cases where the possible outcome is loss of life, liberty, or property — criminal cases in other words. Deportation doesn’t involve any of those outcomes. It’s an administrative remedy applied to someone who is not lawfully in the country. It seeks only to remove that person, not to flog him first. In that sense, the Administration’s contention (whether or not misrepresented by Judge Cobb) seems completely correct.
If the Administration was proposing to throw people in jail or dispossess them of their property without a trial once it discovered that a person arrested for a crime was in addition an illegal alien, that would be a denial of due process. Even if it wanted to do no more than fine people without a hearing for the misdemeanor of entering the country illegally or overstaying a visa, that too would be a denial of due process. But all it wants to do with the apprehended alien is send him home intact as a free man. No due process applies.
This is all explained in detail on various pages of the website of the U.S. State Dept.
(FWIW, almost no one facing deportation from “sunny ways” Canada ever goes before a judge. There are lay hearings, mostly regarding asylum claims, but they are all handled as a function of the executive administrative state, not the legal system. We don’t grant “due process” to aliens in deportation cases, either, if all we want to do is deport them. A few unsuccessful asylum claimants do sue in Federal Court but this is so expensive that only those generously financed by activist organizations do. It’s cheaper to just ignore a deportation order and disappear. All the Trump Administration is trying to do is get them out of your country before they can abscond.)
This comment is over 900 words long and thus 1.5 X longer than the limit. Please read the Roolz and limit comments to 600 words or less.
Thank you.
Ohmigosh I’m sorry. I just lost track of of the length. Sincerest apologies.